World Dyslexia Forum, 3 – 5 February 2010, UNESCO, Paris

vocabulary skill whereas performance on tasks of visual skills or phonologicalawareness failed to distinguish the group. Research showed that morphologicalawareness might be a core theoretical construct necessary for explaining variability inreading Chinese. Morphological instruction aided mastery of the structural rules ofdifferent types of characters followed by application of the rules used analytically whenlearning to read and write. Children could make use of such strategies when they hadcorrectly learnt the morphological rules of Chinese orthography.EnglishProfessor Jenny Thomson from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, USA,reported on the feedback from the USA, Europe, parts of Africa, and South-East Asia.Literacy was encouraged and seen as essential for the development of knowledge andsociety. Where access was equal girls outperformed boys. Where funding wasadequate it had to be decided if it was better allocated to raising the population mean orto improving those below and above the mean. There were laws against discriminationin the USA and UK but criteria of eligibility had to be agreed; research showed thatliteracy ability was a continuum which then posed the problem of whether one shouldestablish a discrete cut-off point to intervene or wait for the child to fail. In terms ofremediation, good practice depended on developing phonological awareness - bothsupported and independent reading of progressively harder texts - as well as thedevelopment of comprehension strategies for reading. In terms of process, teachingshould be phonetics-based, multisensory, cumulative and sequential. Training shouldaim at automatisation of skills through continuous practice in small, ‘scaffolded’ steps.Professor Thomson reviewed some important references and concluded her report withan affirmation of the key role of the teacher in providing motivation, self-confidence, andachievable, monitored goals.FrenchProfessor José Morais from the Free University of Brussels, Belgium, started with thepremise that ‘at the behavioral level dyslexia was the selective impairment of the abilityto identify the written word’. The cognitive level of description was the one that couldinspire the best method of detecting and helping children with dyslexia. Not all poorreaders were dyslexic. Conditions for learning to read in the alphabetic system of writingwere the discovery of the alphabetic principle, the progressive mastery of theorthographic code of the language, and the constitution of an orthographic lexicon.Phonemic awareness was the strongest contribution to the reading of words. Amongstthe recommendations for action were: more research to compare training programs; thepreparation of teachers according to recent scientific advances; determination of thereader’s profile in order to intervene specifically on impaired abilities; targeting of8